Conceptual Graphs (CG) are a graph-based knowledge representation and reasoning formalism; fuzzy Conceptual Graphs (fCG) constitute an extension that enriches their expressiveness, exploiting the fuzzy set theory so as to relax their constraints at various levels. This paper proposes a comparative study of existing approaches over their respective advantages and possible limitations. The discussion revolves around three axes: (a) Critical view of each approach and comparison with previous propositions from the state of the art; (b) Presentation of the many possible interpretations of each definition to illustrate its potential and its limits; (c) Clarification of the part of CG impacted by the definition as well as the relaxed constraint.

Graph embedding techniques have been increasingly employed in real-world machine learning tasks on graph-structured data, such as social recommendations and protein structure modeling. Since the generation of a graph is inevitably affected by some sensitive node attributes (such as gender and age of users in a social network), the learned graph representations can inherit such sensitive information and introduce undesirable biases in downstream tasks. Most existing works on debiasing graph representations add ad-hoc constraints on the learned embeddings to restrict their distributions, which however compromise the utility of resulting graph representations in downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a principled new way for obtaining unbiased representations by learning from an underlying bias-free graph that is not influenced by sensitive attributes. Based on this new perspective, we propose two complementary methods for uncovering such an underlying graph with the goal of introducing minimum impact on the utility of learned representations in downstream tasks. Both our theoretical justification and extensive experiment comparisons against state-of-the-art solutions demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

Driving styles summarize different driving behaviors that reflect in the movements of the vehicles. These behaviors may indicate a tendency to perform riskier maneuvers, consume more fuel or energy, break traffic rules, or drive carefully. Therefore, this paper presents a driving style recognition using Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Inference System with Multiple Experts Decision-Making for classifying drivers into calm, moderate and aggressive. This system receives as input features longitudinal and lateral kinematic parameters of the vehicle motion. The type-2 fuzzy sets are more robust than type-1 fuzzy sets when handling noisy data, because their membership function are also fuzzy sets. In addition, a multiple experts approach can reduce the bias and imprecision while building the fuzzy rulebase, which stores the knowledge of the fuzzy system. The proposed approach was evaluated using descriptive statistics analysis, and compared with clustering algorithms and a type-1 fuzzy inference system. The results show the tendency to associate lower kinematic profiles for the driving styles classified with the type-2 fuzzy inference system when compared to other algorithms, which is in line with the more conservative approach adopted in the aggregation of the experts' opinions.

In human pedagogy, teachers and students can interact adaptively to maximize communication efficiency. The teacher adjusts her teaching method for different students, and the student, after getting familiar with the teacher's instruction mechanism, can infer the teacher's intention to learn faster. Recently, the benefits of integrating this cooperative pedagogy into machine concept learning in discrete spaces have been proved by multiple works. However, how cooperative pedagogy can facilitate machine parameter learning hasn't been thoroughly studied. In this paper, we propose a gradient optimization based teacher-aware learner who can incorporate teacher's cooperative intention into the likelihood function and learn provably faster compared with the naive learning algorithms used in previous machine teaching works. We give theoretical proof that the iterative teacher-aware learning (ITAL) process leads to local and global improvements. We then validate our algorithms with extensive experiments on various tasks including regression, classification, and inverse reinforcement learning using synthetic and real data. We also show the advantage of modeling teacher-awareness when agents are learning from human teachers.

This paper studies the problem of performing a sequence of optimal interventions in a causal dynamical system where both the target variable of interest and the inputs evolve over time. This problem arises in a variety of domains e.g. system biology and operational research. Dynamic Causal Bayesian Optimization (DCBO) brings together ideas from sequential decision making, causal inference and Gaussian process (GP) emulation. DCBO is useful in scenarios where all causal effects in a graph are changing over time. At every time step DCBO identifies a local optimal intervention by integrating both observational and past interventional data collected from the system. We give theoretical results detailing how one can transfer interventional information across time steps and define a dynamic causal GP model which can be used to quantify uncertainty and find optimal interventions in practice. We demonstrate how DCBO identifies optimal interventions faster than competing approaches in multiple settings and applications.

Recently, the information-theoretical framework has been proven to be able to obtain non-vacuous generalization bounds for large models trained by Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) with isotropic noise. In this paper, we optimize the information-theoretical generalization bound by manipulating the noise structure in SGLD. We prove that with constraint to guarantee low empirical risk, the optimal noise covariance is the square root of the expected gradient covariance if both the prior and the posterior are jointly optimized. This validates that the optimal noise is quite close to the empirical gradient covariance. Technically, we develop a new information-theoretical bound that enables such an optimization analysis. We then apply matrix analysis to derive the form of optimal noise covariance. Presented constraint and results are validated by the empirical observations.

We present a variational method for online state estimation and parameter learning in state-space models (SSMs), a ubiquitous class of latent variable models for sequential data. As per standard batch variational techniques, we use stochastic gradients to simultaneously optimize a lower bound on the log evidence with respect to both model parameters and a variational approximation of the states' posterior distribution. However, unlike existing approaches, our method is able to operate in an entirely online manner, such that historic observations do not require revisitation after being incorporated and the cost of updates at each time step remains constant, despite the growing dimensionality of the joint posterior distribution of the states. This is achieved by utilizing backward decompositions of this joint posterior distribution and of its variational approximation, combined with Bellman-type recursions for the evidence lower bound and its gradients. We demonstrate the performance of this methodology across several examples, including high-dimensional SSMs and sequential Variational Auto-Encoders.

We present a framework for transfer learning based on modular variational Gaussian processes (GP). We develop a module-based method that having a dictionary of well fitted GPs, one could build ensemble GP models without revisiting any data. Each model is characterised by its hyperparameters, pseudo-inputs and their corresponding posterior densities. Our method avoids undesired data centralisation, reduces rising computational costs and allows the transfer of learned uncertainty metrics after training. We exploit the augmentation of high-dimensional integral operators based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence between stochastic processes to introduce an efficient lower bound under all the sparse variational GPs, with different complexity and even likelihood distribution. The method is also valid for multi-output GPs, learning correlations a posteriori between independent modules. Extensive results illustrate the usability of our framework in large-scale and multi-task experiments, also compared with the exact inference methods in the literature.

The need for algorithms able to solve Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems with few trials has motivated the advent of model-based RL methods. The reported performance of model-based algorithms has dramatically increased within recent years. However, it is not clear how much of the recent progress is due to improved algorithms or due to improved models. While different modeling options are available to choose from when applying a model-based approach, the distinguishing traits and particular strengths of different models are not clear. The main contribution of this work lies precisely in assessing the model influence on the performance of RL algorithms. A set of commonly adopted models is established for the purpose of model comparison. These include Neural Networks (NNs), ensembles of NNs, two different approximations of Bayesian NNs (BNNs), that is, the Concrete Dropout NN and the Anchored Ensembling, and Gaussian Processes (GPs). The model comparison is evaluated on a suite of continuous control benchmarking tasks. Our results reveal that significant differences in model performance do exist. The Concrete Dropout NN reports persistently superior performance. We summarize these differences for the benefit of the modeler and suggest that the model choice is tailored to the standards required by each specific application.

Hierarchical forecasting problems arise when time series compose a group structure that naturally defines aggregation and disaggregation coherence constraints for the predictions. In this work, we explore a new forecast representation, the Poisson Mixture Mesh (PMM), that can produce probabilistic, coherent predictions; it is compatible with the neural forecasting innovations, and defines simple aggregation and disaggregation rules capable of accommodating hierarchical structures, unknown during its optimization. We performed an empirical evaluation to compare the PMM \ to other hierarchical forecasting methods on Australian domestic tourism data, where we obtain a 20 percent relative improvement.